After a longer than intended delay, I'm happy to announce the 3.0 release of my Crell/ApiProblem library.

ApiProblem is a small, self-contained library for modeling IETF RFC 7807 "Problem Details" messages. (I know, more gibberish.) That is, it makes it easier for PHP developers to build a message for their API servers to handle cases where Something Bad Happened(tm).

I am all for testing. Whether you always write unit tests in advance as Test Driven Development (TDD) advocates call for, write them after, write them alongside, a little of each, I don't care. Tests are your friend. You want tests, and specifically you want good tests.

There's a lot of opinions on what constitutes a "good" test, of course, and much is subjective to the type of code you're working on. However, since the release of PHP 7 I've found that while writing tests... I am never using a mocking library. In fact, I'm going to go as far and say that

The other day I was working on some sample code to test out an idea that involved an object with an internal nested array. This is a pretty common pattern in PHP: You have some simple one-off internal data structure so you make an informal struct using PHP associative arrays. Maybe you document it in a docblock, or maybe you're a lazy jerk and you don't. (Fight me!) But really, who bothers with defining a class for something that simple?

But that got me wondering, is that common pattern really, you know, good? Are objects actually more expensive or harder to work with than arrays? Or, more to the point, is that true today on PHP 7 given all the optimizations that have happened over the years compared with the bad old days of PHP 4?

So like any good scientist I decided to test it: What I found will shock you!

Recently I was working on some PHP code (for the PHP-FIG) that involved code generation. Lots of systems these days are doing code generation (compiled dependency injection containers, ORM classes, etc.), but surprisingly I've avoided having to touch that code myself until now.

Of course, like any good developer I was writing tests for it as I went. That meant needing to test that the generated code was valid PHP syntax and did what I wanted it to do.

Earlier this week a fellow PHP public figure tweeted saying that I write great session proposals for conferences. After I finished blushing I reached out to him and we talked a bit about what it was he likes about them. (Whatever I'm doing right, I want to know to keep doing it!)

Based on that, I figured it would be educational to dissect how I go about writing session proposals for conferences and hope that conference organizers don't catch on to my tricks. :-)

Articles, blog posts, and Twitter debates around "best practices" abound. You can't swing a dead cat without bumping into some article espousing the benefits of designing and building software a certain way. (Side note: What kind of sick person are you that you're swinging a dead cat around? Stop that! You're desecrating the dead!)